The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  Forty-five minutes later, Taboga comes into view. I glance at Danilo, who is picking at a scab on his knee. He must have seen it a dozen times—green hills, like the rounded backs of hulking monsters; pastel houses built into their sloping sides; an arc of beige sand at the front; a huddle of rocking wooden boats docked by the pier; tiers and tiers of trees and plants so lush they’re all just a mass.

  “That’s it?” I ask, pointing.

  “Good eye,” he says sarcastically.

  When we step foot on land, Danilo starts off toward the left while the rest of the passengers move collectively to the right.

  “Should we be going that way?” I ask.

  “They’re all going to the hotel. It has a private beach and a place to shower, so people like it. But we’re going into town.”

  We wend our way through narrow cobblestone streets with dogs ambling lazily along the edges of the thick green foliage. We pass a dance hall and a church and a makeshift soccer field where someone has rigged up an old pink shower curtain to serve as a goal at one end. We ask random people on the street and people resting in hammocks on their patios for information about my father, but all we get in return is shaking heads and blank stares. Finally, when we come to a small house that’s been converted into a restaurant, we stop.

  “I think we should ask here,” Danilo says. “I know the waitress. She’s been here forever, so if anyone would know, she would.”

  We take a seat inside at a small round table under a ceiling fan. When the waitress approaches, I expect Danilo to make his customary inquiry, but instead he orders food: plantains, rice, and a Panama beer.

  “Do you want anything?” he asks.

  “We’re going to eat?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  I order a tutti-frutti soda, a flavor found everywhere here.

  “What are we doing?” I ask after the waitress leaves. A bell rings outside, presumably from the church we passed earlier.

  Danilo leans across the table. “She’s not the one we’re looking for.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask her anyway? She might know something.”

  “You want to ask her? Be my guest.”

  When she comes back with Danilo’s food on a bright blue plate and my soda in a sweaty glass bottle wrapped halfway up the sides in a thin napkin that looks like a cast, I say, “Excuse me. We’re looking for somebody. A man named Gatún Gallardo. Do you know him?”

  The waitress—she’s young, and she wears large gold hoop earrings and a delicate gold necklace with the letter B hanging from it—shakes her head. Her earrings twist and sway, hitting her jaw. “I don’t know him,” she says. “But I just started this job last week. If he lives here, then I wouldn’t know.” She looks at Danilo. “Do you live here?”

  “Taboga? No.”

  “The city?” She smiles, then coyly bites her bottom lip.

  “Yes,” Danilo says. “With her.” He points to me. “We live together.”

  The waitress glances at me as if she has forgotten I was there. “Her? I thought she was, like, your little cousin or something.”

  Without missing a beat, Danilo says, “That’s funny. I thought you were, like, going to get a tip or something.” He smiles sweetly and cocks his head.

  The waitress stands stunned for a moment before she walks away.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  He doesn’t say anything. He seems annoyed suddenly, maybe at the waitress, maybe at having to defend me, maybe at the fact that my presence interfered with the possibility of hooking up with her, maybe because I wasted time asking her about my father even after Danilo told me she wasn’t the one we needed to talk to, maybe some other reason altogether. He gulps down the rest of his beer, then wipes the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. When he sees the waitress again, he beckons her over.

  “Changed your mind?” she asks, standing with her back pointedly toward me.

  “Where’s Gloria?” he asks.

  “She doesn’t work here anymore. You get me now.”

  “Since when?”

  “I told you. Last week. She got married and moved to Paraguay.”

  “She got married? She was, like, eighty.”

  The waitress turns up her palms. “Love.” She looks at me. “You can’t explain it, right?”

  I take Danilo’s lead from earlier, letting impudence get the best of me. “You probably can’t. You’re right,” I say.

  Danilo snickers.

  “Fuck you,” she says, and turns on her heel.

  “Weak,” Danilo says under his breath, smiling as though the whole thing was a game. “But you,” he points his fork at me. “That was good.”

  My heart is pounding from whatever’s gotten into me. I can’t believe I said that to her. And I can’t believe what she said to me. No one’s ever said anything like that to me before. Oh God, wait until I tell Beth. But for now I just nurse my soda and feel an unfamiliar sort of euphoria about it all.

  By the time we walk out of the restaurant, though, euphoria gives way to disappointment once again beating its wings against the insides of my bones. I really did think—and maybe it was naïve—that all we needed was a change of scenery, that coming to Taboga would somehow break open our search and reveal something new. Danilo must sense my frustration, because after a few paces outside, he says, “Come on!” and starts running, kicking up dust as he goes.

  I have no choice but to run after him, the humid air like a web I have to fight through in order to move. My bag bounces even as I try to hold the strap firm. My skin tingles with dissolving sweat.

  “Where are you going?” I yell after him, but he doesn’t answer.

  Soon enough, though, I realize that he’s running toward the water. I’m a fair distance behind him and I watch as he bounds over the uneven sand and does a belly flop, fully clothed, onto an incoming wave. Then he stands up and, after shaking his head like a dog, beads of saltwater spraying, turns to see whether I followed him in or whether, as he must have known I would, I planted myself in the sand far from the lapping water.

  “What are you doing?” he yells.

  “What are you doing?” I yell back.

  I want to have followed him—impulsively, foolhardily, without any inhibitions. Every time I think I am becoming that sort of person, there’s some reminder of how fundamentally I am not.

  “I’m swimming,” he says. “Do you want to come swimming with me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We’re still shouting at each other. A young girl carrying an inflatable raft under her arm is staring at us. She and a slightly older boy whom I take to be her brother are the only other people on this stretch of shore.

  “It feels great in here!” Danilo says.

  I take off my hat, then pull my bag off my shoulder, over my head. I look at the kids. They wouldn’t steal it, would they? I bend down to untie my shoes.

  “Miraflores, I swear to God!” Danilo yells.

  “What?” I say.

  But I know. I stop untying and walk toward him. When I get to where the sand is darker and packed firmer from the water, I keep going. A film of foam skates over the rubber toes of my sneakers. I take another few steps and feel the water seep in through the eyelets in my shoes. Then the water is to my ankles. To my knees. I bend down as it rises to my waist. It flows under my shirt and when I stand up straight again, my shirt sucks back against my body, clinging to my ribs.

  Danilo says, “You know how to swim, right?”

  I duck my head under and stroke out to where he is. When I come up, he says, “I guess you do.”

  “I took swimming lessons as a kid.”

  “Oh yeah? So you’re good?”

  “Not really. But I know how.”

  “You think you could beat me out to that buoy? See it? Floating in the water?”

  “The orange ball?” I rake my wet hair back with my fingers, wondering how I must look to him.

  “Come on. Ready?” he says. “Go
.”

  We make it out to the buoy at about the same time. I think I would have won, but anytime I got ahead of him, Danilo grabbed my ankle under the water and dragged me back so he could pass me with a vigorous surge of kicking. It’s deep enough by the buoy that we have to tread water. Danilo’s T-shirt balloons up around him like the body of a jellyfish. His wet hair, glistening in the sun, sticks up in sharp, separated points like the scales on a pinecone, and he looks off toward the horizon as he works his arms just below the surface. The water is so clear that I can see all the way down to our shoes. I can see his bare waist. I can taste the saltwater on my lips. My nose is a little runny.

  “Hey,” I say. “Did you know that if it were possible to extract all the salt out of the ocean and dump it over all the land on earth, there would be a layer of salt more than five hundred feet high?”

  He dips his head and blows a parade of bubbles across the surface of the water.

  “The salt in the ocean is the mineral . . .” I don’t know the word for “residue,” so I say it in English. “Residue from rocks that . . .” I don’t know the word for “eroded,” either. “Never mind,” I say.

  We rise and fall with each passing wave, close enough to each other that when I scull my arms under the water, my fingertips occasionally brush his. Then Danilo shoots up like a rocket, sucks in a deep breath, and drops down, pulling me under the water with him. I flutter my eyes. Danilo smiles and waves. And for a few seconds, we’re just floating there, goofily, under the pale aquamarine water, weightless, holding our breath. I don’t know what we’re doing there. I don’t really care. There’s just something about it that feels good. Like a cord has been cut. I’m completely untethered, unconnected, free. Just for a moment.

  We sit on the pier afterward, our dripping clothes blackening the wooden slats underneath us as we wait for the ferry. I can see, though I try not to make it obvious that I’m looking, Danilo’s every line and curve under his wet clothes. The hair on his arms perks up little by little as it dries.

  “I don’t know what else to do about your father,” he says after a time.

  “Maybe we could ask the police or something.”

  Danilo recoils. “In this country? You think the police are going to help you?” He shakes his head.

  I grab the hem of my T-shirt and twist it into a rope, squeezing out the ocean water and watching it plop onto the pier. I run my hand over the rough straw dome of my hat sitting atop my wet hair.

  “What?” Danilo says.

  “What?”

  “You want to say something. I can tell.”

  I sigh. “Danilo, do you remember when we went to the library and I called all those people in the phone book?”

  “Sure.”

  “One of the women I talked to acted strange when I mentioned my father.” I didn’t want to bring it up before now, because it seems like it so easily could be just a figment of my imagination or wishful thinking, but I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind.

  “Strange?”

  “I don’t know. For some reason I remember thinking that she knew him.”

  Danilo furrows his eyebrows. “Really? But why? She said she didn’t.”

  “Right. And then I got off the phone thinking that she was a little bit crazy, anyway. I mean, that she was just kind of . . .”

  “Fucked up?” Danilo tugs his thumbnail against the chip in his tooth, taking in the information. “Maybe she was just fucked up,” he says.

  “I know. Maybe. But what if she wasn’t? Or even if she was, what if she knows something?”

  “I don’t know, Miraflores. We’ve asked almost fifty people in this country whether they’ve heard of your father and no one has any details. I mean, I got you some with Hector Jaén, and I know Hernán told you a little, but I don’t know what else you want to do. We could keep asking around, but the way it works here, everyone knows someone who knows someone. Everyone in this country is, like, connected. So if no one knows anything by now, we probably won’t find anyone who will.”

  “I think we should call that woman back.”

  Danilo looks pained at the suggestion, but the more I think about it, the better an idea it seems. “It couldn’t hurt,” I say. “You call her this time. Ask her for Gatún Gallardo. See what she says. You can see how she sounds to you. That’s all you have to do.”

  “Do you even remember which woman you called, or do we have to go through all the listings again?”

  “She was the second person listed as only Gallardo. No first name.”

  Danilo runs his thumbnail along his teeth again, then sighs deeply. “I don’t know,” he mumbles.

  “Danilo,” I say. I know it’s just that he doesn’t want me to be disappointed again. “Let’s try one more time. Just this one other person. I’m leaving in like a week. There isn’t that much time left.”

  As he stares at me, something in his face, something behind his eyes, crumbles.

  “If we can find her number,” he says, “I’ll give her a call.”

  We return from Taboga in the late afternoon, our clothes dried to a crisp. Danilo is hungry again, so we stop at KFC for chicken. I think he chooses KFC because he believes it’s food that I, as an American, will like. I don’t want to disappoint him or spoil the effort by telling him otherwise. We bring it home with us. I’m too exhausted to eat, though, so I go to my room and lie down for a while. Through the wall, I hear Danilo call Nardo and arrange to meet him at the bat-ting cages. After he leaves, I have the apartment to myself, the sounds of halting traffic from the street below drifting in through the windows and the French doors. For the rest of the day, I lie curled up on the bed, my hands pressed between my knees, my hair damp against the pillowcase, as the light outside grows dimmer. I think about my mother for a little while, and about this ridiculous goose chase I’m on, and about sinking under the water with Danilo earlier that day and how crazily much I wanted to reach my hands out and touch his waist and drift closer to him while we held our breath.

  I nod off for a time and open my eyes again to pitch blackness. I’m on top of the covers, still in my clothes, my shoes tied on my sockless feet. I sit up slowly, drawing away some strands of hair stuck to my cheek and rubbing my eyes. When I turn on the light, my watch shows it’s two-thirty in the morning.

  I’m starving, so I get up and find in the refrigerator the cardboard bucket of chicken, a piece of aluminum foil curled around the top, and take it to the kitchen table. I flip on the soft, peachy light above the table. Ants are climbing over the mangoes in the fruit bowl. Two one-liters of Coke stand on a folded paper towel on the floor beside the refrigerator. The chicken is cold and clammy in my mouth, the fried skin knobby and hardened, but I’m so hungry that it tastes like the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I’ve finished two legs and a wing when Hernán, dressed in boxer shorts and a V-neck undershirt, walks out from his room.

  I don’t see him too often these days. He’s taken to staying in his bedroom while Danilo and I eat breakfast, emerging only after I’ve moved on to the bathroom to shower and dress. Even with the shower water running, I can usually hear him pulling plates out and sliding pans around in the kitchen as he prepares himself a meal. By the time I come out of the steamy bathroom, he’s usually tucked himself into his bedroom to eat his food behind a closed door. He stays there either until Danilo and I leave or until it’s time for him to report to work.

  Now Hernán looks surprised to see me. I lay the chicken—my second wing—down on a napkin. Hernán clears his throat.

  “I was hungry,” I say softly.

  He nods.

  “Do you want some?”

  He appears exceptionally uncomfortable, hanging his hands low over his groin and not moving from where he stands. “I did not know you were awake,” he says apologetically. When he speaks, he sounds different from how he usually sounds. It isn’t until he opens his mouth again—“I was going to watch television,” he says—that I realize he doesn’t have his
dentures in.

  Hesitantly, he makes his way to the small couch at the front of the apartment. From where I sit, I can see him. He takes a pair of headphones from the drawer of an end table and plugs them into a jack at the back of the television. He slides the headphones over his ears, settles himself on the coffee table, and turns on the television. With his hands on his knees, he watches a black-and-white western. I can’t tell whether it’s a movie or an old television program. Hernán keeps shifting himself into good posture, holding his back and neck perfectly erect for a time before he starts slumping again and then, when he notices he’s wilted, straightening himself.

  I wrap the bones and bits of skin from my chicken in my napkin and throw it away. I don’t want to go back to bed, so I walk over to Hernán and tap his shoulder. He startles and jerks his body back. He exhales when he sees it’s only me, and slides the headphone off one of his ears.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I whisper.

  He curls his lips around his gums.

  “Can I watch with you?”

  “Television?”

  “I’m not tired.”

  He looks distressed at the request, so I’m about to tell him that I’ll just read in my room instead when he holds out his hand toward the chair and motions for me to sit. As soon as he unplugs the headphones, sound rushes into the room. He scrambles to jab the volume button on the set until it’s just loud enough to be heard. He puts the headphones away and sits on the couch. We watch for several minutes—a group of men tie up their horses and unfurl their bedrolls in an open field—but it’s clear he’s ill at ease, glancing at me every few seconds then staring at his hands. I think maybe he’s embarrassed to be seen in his underclothes or to be seen without his teeth. Maybe he’ll relax before long. But at the first commercial he stands up and says, “I think I am tired after all.” He makes a show of yawning and stretching his arms overhead.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you,” I say. “I can go to my room. You should stay out here.”